By Joshua Ryan

It wasn’t totally dark in there.  The place reminded me of a parking garage or an auto shop.  Lights were hanging from the ceiling, and not far from the spot where Dean parked you could see a little inside building blazing with light against the murky background.  It was apparently some kind of office where we had to stop.

Dean unlimbered his big body and stood in front of the car.  Another big guy came out of the office, carrying a cell phone in his hand.  This guy also looked like a cop, but he was wearing a gray uniform.  He was talking loud, and Dean talked loud to match him.

“Hey bro.  How’s it goin.”

“How’s it goin, Hal.”

“Not so bad.  I see you got somethin in there.”  He peered at me in the back seat, chained under glass.  Then he pulled out his phone.  “Name?”

“Meres,” Dean said.  “M-e-r-e-s.  Here’s his shit.”

He handed a brown envelope to the man in gray, who opened it and checked its contents against whatever he saw on the phone.

“Too bad,” he said, “we still gotta deal with all this paper work.  Driver’s license, Order to Report … Why ain’t it just online?”

“Because offenders fake shit online?”

“Good point, dude.  But yeah, he’s on the invoice.  Liam?” he said into the phone.  “Right.  Got one here.”  He clicked off and turned back to Dean.  “So, who you got in the US Open?”

“Finalists?  Gordon.”

“Fuck!  I doubt it.”

“Yeah?  You know me — I like to be on the edge.  So you want some a me?”

“Nah.  You beat me on the Ohio game.”

“Yeah?”

“Like you don’t remember.  Hey, that was my kid’s Christmas money.”

“Yeah, sure.  Well, I’m puttin 500 on Gordon.”

“Huh?  Well … OK, let’s do it.  You know, Dean…”

My door suddenly opened; a young man in gray reached in and sprang the catch on my seat belt.  Then he dragged me out of the car.

“Hey! Liam!” Dean’s friend yelled at the young guy.  “Go ahead and prep him!”

“Right,” Liam replied, and pulled me into the office.  I turned my head and heard Dean saying, “It’s not like I always win…”

Thanks for the warm goodbye, Dean.

There was a counter in the office, and Liam got himself behind it.  “Stand there,” he said.  “Show me your cuffs.”  I raised my cuffs and “showed” them, and he locked them to a ring on the counter.  His computer booted.

“Name?”

“Steven Meres.”

“Last name first.”

“Meres.  Steven.”

“Sir.”

Even then, for a second I didn’t know what he meant.

“Meres, Steven.  Sir.”

He was 20 years old, and he was wearing gray pants and a matching gray shirt that fitted him perfectly, and a black tie that he had knotted perfectly into a perfectly folded collar.  His hair was dark brown and perfectly cut a half inch above his ears, his lips were red, and his hard large eyes were blue.

“That’s better,” he said.  “Remember that.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Also remember this.”

He pointed to the plastic tag on his chest.  “OFR COLLISON,” it said.  I’d always pitied people who had to wear their names on their clothes — “I’m Devin.  How Can I Serve You?”  Now I had to feel something else.  “I am Officer Collison,” he said.

“Yes, Sir.  Officer Collison.”  I choked it out, and he turned back to his screen.  I was surprised at how disgusting these dominance and subjection rituals were turning out to be.

He typed on his keyboard for a while.  Then he flicked a switch and a dull light came on.  It was shining underneath a little plastic panel on the counter.

“Put your hand on that.  Right hand.”

It wasn’t easy to raise my cuffed hands and swivel them till the right one got onto the plastic.

“Palm down,” he said.  The cuffs dragged and clanked on the counter, but my hand still hadn’t gone flat.

“DOWN,” he repeated.  He grasped my hand firmly and pressed it down.  He had more muscle in his wrist than I had in my whole body.  A bright light pulsed on and off.  “Other one,” he said.  But he didn’t wait for me to try it on my own.  He grabbed my left hand and twisted it till it was flat on the screen.  On and off.  He discarded my hand like a used boyfriend and turned back to his computer.  Two clouds of fingerprints appeared, faintly visible, on the screen that angled between us.  He must have been matching my old ones with my new ones.

On the other side of the office windows I saw Dean shaking hands with Hal and getting back in his cop car.  The garage door chunked upward.  Dean’s car vanished into the daylight.

“Hold out your arm,” Officer Collison said.  “Right arm.”

Huh?  While I’d been looking through the window, a strip of white plastic had been oozing out of a little box next to his computer.  He pulled it up, wrapped it around my arm, and clamped the ends together.  The bracelet fitted snugly on my wrist.  Not too big, not too small — it was just right for me.  On it was stamped a barcode, followed by black letters that said:

MERES STEVEN CURTIS D.O.C. 746051

“That’s your name,” he told me.  “746051.  From now on, you’ll be wearin that.  Don’t worry — it won’t come off.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“OK,” Hal said, stomping into the room and slapping the brown envelope down on the counter.  “I’m goin to the can.  Think you can handle the resta this?”

“Sure, sarge,” Officer Collison said.

Hal left.  Officer Collison opened the envelope and pulled out my license and my Order to Report.  Then he came around the counter and stood behind me.  I felt his hand pulling my wallet out of my back pocket.  He threw it onto the counter and with no wasted motion plunged his hands into my right front pocket, then my left, expertly evading my dick.  Out came 52 cents in change, two pieces of Kleenex, a ballpoint pen, and my cell phone.  He splayed it all out on the counter.  Then he dumped the contents of my wallet, gave them a bored look, and began banging things into his computer.  He was really a handsome young guy.  Against the fluorescent glow of the office his profile was as sharp and clear as a Hollywood star.

“All right,” he said, turning toward me, like a garage guy telling you what he’s billing you for, “you’re inventoried with the following: Order to Report, driver’s license, phone, four credit cards, one health insurance card, one health club identity card, one supermarket discount card, two cards containing phone numbers and addresses, a pen, two hundred nine dollars and 52 cents in cash and change, and a membership card in the Grant City Library.  If this inventory is correct, sign this form.”  He turned the screen so I could read it.  There was a box where I could sign, and I did, as well as I could with my cuffs on.

“This,” he said, putting another form on the screen, “is the Order for Disposal.  It provides…”  His high, clear voice recited the terms of a legal contract granting the Department of Corrections the right “to dispose of all property in inmate’s possession upon surrender to custody in the Department of Corrections, as well as to dispose of the physical remains of said inmate in the event of inmate’s decease during inmate’s custody in the Department of Corrections, unless, by the following clauses, inmate shall designate another recipient for this property and remains…”   Fuck!  Where did I want my “physical remains” to go?

All right, I thought, the Department can keep “all property in inmate’s possession.”  And “in the event” of my “decease,” sure, it can have my body!  Why should my lawyer get it?  Or my brother!  I jerked my cuffed hands up to the screen and signed.  With an easy motion he swept the aforesaid “property in inmate’s possession” into a medium-size baggie, taped the Order for Disposal to the front, and dropped it into a box that was, like me, attached to the counter.  All gone.

“This way,” he said, unlocking me from the furniture and showing me out of the office.  I was learning to walk in handcuffs and shackles, but I wasn’t learning fast enough for him.  He lingered a pace behind me and kept a constant patter of “hurry it up.”  At the back of the garage was a sign saying:

INMATES LINE UP HERE

Beneath it was a trail of yellow footprints painted on the concrete, pointed toward a door.  Officer Collison got in front of me to open it, prissing his ass like he was personally insulted that I was the only inmate who’d showed up that morning.  “Inside,” he ordered.  “And grab a box.”

I was in a long, white, featureless hallway.  Next to the door was a stack of those cardboard boxes you use when you’re preparing for the moving van.  I reached up in my cuffs and pulled one off the top.

“See that line,” he said.  There was a yellow line painted on the floor, about four feet from the wall on the left.  “Toe that line.  Now face me.”  I faced him, holding my box, with my feet on the line.  “Whenever you see that line on the floor, you stand on the other side of the line from me.  Me or any other officer.  You are an inmate.  You stand on the inmate’s side.  I am an officer.  I stand on the officer’s side.  Unless I tell you different.  Then you do what I tell you to do.  Got it?”

“Got it.”

“GOT IT WHAT?”

“Got it, Sir. … Sorry, Sir.”

His face darkened, but he didn’t pursue the matter.  Probably he had other things to do, back in the office.

“All right, turn and face the wall.  Hands on your head.”   I felt my shackles loosen and fall to the floor.  “Face me.  Hold out your hands.”  He took off my cuffs.  Fuck, that was good!  He threw the cuffs and shackles across his shoulder and hung them on the wall on the opposite side of the room.  The officer’s side.  There was a huge collection of them over there.  Then he was back.

“Strip,” he said.  “Everything off.”

OK, I knew this was coming.  I just didn’t think it would be this embarrassing.  The guy was ten years younger than I was, in perfect physical condition.  I was embarrassed just to take off my shirt.  That membership in the health club hadn’t been used very much, and there’s nothing about writing that keeps you in shape.  When I took down my pants, I remembered that the normal male has about six inches, though right now, with all the fear and the stress and the disappointment about my exciting adventure becoming so … crude, I didn’t even want to see how far my dick must have shriveled.  One thing I knew — the guy watching me (pretending to watch me, but actually being bored out of his 20-year-old skull) had a lot more than six inches.  Otherwise he wouldn’t have been such a moron.

Now my clothes, my beautiful, expensive clothes, were lying on the concrete floor.  “Dump that shit in the box,” he said. “Write your name on the outside.”  He pulled a marker out of his pants and gave it to me.  “On the side.  Last name first.  Print, don’t write.”  When I’d printed MERES STEVEN on the side of my box, he told me to pick it up and “dump it in the hole.”  The hole was a little square opening in the wall, covered by one of those dangly rubber curtains that you see in airports when you check your baggage and it rides away from you on the conveyor belt.  In this case, there was no baggage check or courteous attendant.   There was just a naked man throwing his last remaining possessions into a hole.

“Back on the line,” he said.  “Gimme that.”  I was still carrying his marker.  He took it and returned it to his pants.  Was that a bulge next to his pocket?  Was he excited to be putting on that blue plastic glove he’d picked up from somewhere while I was getting back on the line?  Because I’d guessed what the glove was for.

I’d been naked in locker rooms and health clubs, but I’d never been so naked as I was now in the contemptuous eyes of young Officer Collison.  He started by putting me through all the monkey moves of the strip search.  I’d watched movies, I’d read stories, I’d written stories, but I never knew there were so many parts in the exercise.  Open your mouth.  Wider.  I said wider.  Tongue up.  Tongue down.  Now grab your ears.  Wiggle em.  Lift your right foot.  Lift your left foot.  Now turn around.  Squat.  Lower!  Cough.  Again … But once I saw the glove, I understood what the final move would be.  When he told me to grab my cheeks and pull em back, I knew that one of those hands was going to fuck my butt.  I’d had lots of fantasies about that — and yes, put some of them into writing.  The cop would toy with my ass, to make me show him that I wanted it; he would then slowly thrust himself into my hole and, while I writhed deliciously in pain, he would show me what it meant to be full of another man, to be looted and ruined and taught that from now on my ass had no mysteries to conceal, that he was my master and keeper … That’s what I’d written.  And other words that I remembered, along with the fan messages I got about how hot those scenes were.

So I was wondering HOW exciting this experience would be … That’s when he pushed his fingers into me, turned them left and right, and popped them out, like a cork leaving a bottle of cheap wine.  Thirty seconds of pain, and the glove dropped into a trash can.  That was it.  The scene meant nothing.  He had gone into my ass to see if it was hiding something, and it wasn’t.  He might as well have been checking a drain pipe.

“Now march over to the height chart.”

“March”?  Angry parents tell their kids to “march up to bed.”  I looked at the youth who was bossing me.  No, he wasn’t making a joke.  I was in prison; I had to “march.”

“Keep to the inmate side!”

Huh?  Oh, I had to stay on my side of that line on the floor.

“Yes, Sir.”

“Don’t make me tell you again.”

“No, Sir.”  You stupid fuck.

I reached the section of wall that had lines painted on it, and numbers to say what they meant — 5’0”, 5’3”, 5’6”, 5’9” … Anyone who’d watched a crime movie knew what was going to happen.  Officer Collison stuck a key into some machinery on the opposite wall and a long rod slanted down from the ceiling.  There was a black box on the end of it — that would be the camera.  He shifted the box till it was in the right place.  “All right, I’m gonna mug you now.  Back against the wall.  Hands off your nuts.  Stand straight.  I said hands off your nuts!  Any tatts on you?”

Tatts?  God, tattoos!  “No, Sir.”

“What’s that on your shoulder?”

“That’s a scar.  A freak accident.  When I was in college…”

He gave “college” a scornful look.

“Sir.”

“All right.  Turn left.  Turn right.  Backside.  You’re through.  See that doorway?  March your ass down there.”

No, he wasn’t angry.  He’d done this before.  Said this before.  He wasn’t angry; he was bored.  I was learning that naked men can be a bore, especially if they’re me.

The flap-flap of my feet echoed on the concrete walls until I got to an open doorway.  “Inside,” he said, pointing with his thumb.  Two steps down and I was in the shower room — a white tiled box with lines of pipes on the ceiling and heads hanging down from the pipes.

“Take that one.”  One of the heads started running, and I stood under it.  Not warm.

“Here’s your soap.”  I heard a plop at my feet.  A thumb-sized chunk of brown was melting on the tiles.

I rubbed it around for a while.  Then the water stopped.

“Dry off.”  He handed me a piece of cloth the size of a hand towel.  Maybe smaller.

Shivering?  I was shaking my butt off.  But I’d got to the stage of the welcoming ceremonies where the officer pointed at a battered trash bin and said, “Drop your towel in there,” and in exchange dropped a little pile of orange in front of my feet.  “Put em on,” he said.

On top were two pieces of orange plastic that I assumed to be footwear.  Beneath was a stack of orange cloth that resolved itself into a t-shirt and a pair of shorts.  The tee seemed normal, except … There were black letters on the pec and across the back, identifying it as property of the DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS.  The shorts said the same, on the right thigh and the left butt cheek.  So all right, maybe this was like high school, where I wore ST. VINCENT’S P.E. on my pec and thigh, with a tiny silhouette of the saint above it.  Nice try, but no; it wasn’t the same look.  When I began getting into this outfit, I discovered that nothing was normal.  The tee was square and boxy.  The shorts were … short, and tight in the crotch, so tight I was glad there wasn’t any fly for my junk to flop out of.   But if I ever got hard again, my cock would start pushing out of those short, skimpy legs…

My excitement didn’t last long.  “Put your booties on,” said Officer Collison.  His eyes were as hard as ever, but a snicker was creeping around his mouth.  He loved turning men into funny little not-men.  My “booties” were the lumps of plastic he’d put on top of the pile.  They were like slippers, I guess, except that they had no backs; so they were like flipflops, except that they were thick and heavy.  Putting your feet in them was like playing a stupid kids’ game, where you become some weird creature in some weird story.  Now, however, weird was real.

“Hey man.”  I looked up from my shoes to see a guy in medical scrubs standing next to Officer Collison.  The guy was young and black.  The plastic tag on his chest said ORLANDO.

“Whazzup,” the officer said.

Orlando glowered at me.  “Man,” he said (to the officer), “don’t they realize I got stuff to DO?  Bringin me in here for one fuckin noob?  Why don’t they send him to Meds, so I don’t hafta come all this fuckin way?”

“Yeah man.  Sorry.  Normal procedure.  Lemme know when he’s through.”  He sauntered away.  He was already on his phone.

Orlando took out a key and opened a door.  “Git in there,” he told me.  “Boy.”

The room was your normal medical exam room, but without the cheerful pictures on the walls or the charts that help you to KNOW YOUR KIDNEYS.  Just some steel cabinets with instruments on top, and one of those things you can crawl up and sit on or lie on while Mr. or Ms. Medical is working on you.

“Sit,” he said.  “Show me your wristband.”

He scanned it into his laptop.  “Pull up your shirt.”  Suddenly I was exquisitely conscious of the fact that I was wearing an orange inmate shirt.  He was a person; I was an inmate.

He dropped a cold stethoscope on my chest and listened.  Then he measured my blood pressure.  “You nervous or somethin?”

“No … Sir.”  Actually, I’m completely calm.  I go to prison every day.

“135 over 84.  Guess you’ll calm down.  Once you get used to bein locked up.”

After that, he wrapped a piece of rubber around my arm and told me to clench my fist.  He wasn’t very good at taking a blood sample.  He stabbed, and I yelped.  “Shut the fuck up,” he replied.  Very calm, very bored.

Then it was time for my urine sample. “Do it over there,” he said, handing me the bottle and pointing me toward a corner.  “I don’t need your piss on my examinin table.”  I’d always been piss-shy.  What would happen if I couldn’t do it?  Luckily, the nurse was fiddling with his phone rather than watching me.  I pulled my shorts down — nope, still no fly — and stuck my cock in the bottle.  Fortunately, as I noticed, I really needed to piss, and it flowed until the bottle was almost full.

“I didn’t tell you to fill this thing,” he said when I handed it over.  “What am I supposed to do with all of that?”

“I … uh…”

“Roun here, you better learn to obey orders.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Pull down your shorts.”

“Yes … Sir…”

I dropped them a foot or so, and he pulled them down to my feet.  Then pulled up my dick and looked at it in the way that a man with a big one looks at a guy who’s shriveled down to an inch and a half.  Grabbed my balls and squeezed my dick.  Made me cough.  Looked into my piss slit.

“Pull em up,” he said, and got on his phone.  “He’s done.  Come and get him.”  Officer Collison came down the hall and got me.

“Coffee?” he said, but not to me.

“Sure,” the nurse said.  “I’ll meet you.  I got samples to deliver first.”

“Right,” the officer said.  “I got one to deliver too.”  They laughed.  “See ya in 15.”

“Right, bro.”

The officer turned to me.  “Git your ASS on the left side of that line!”  I guess I was slow in getting there, because he gave me a suspicious look and decided to put a pair of cuffs on me.  Then he told me to march.

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NOTE: Shorter stories (with pictures) by Joshua Ryan are also available at prisonprocess.tumblr.com